Partner Profile | Vibrant Planet

While science provides the backbone to everything we do, and finance is the vehicle in which we get that done, collaborative partnerships create the path forward. These partnerships are essential to accomplishing our shared goal: landscape-scale restoration that happens now. Every partner plays a critical role in bringing restoration projects to fruition, and by working together can we continue to make a lasting and positive impact on landscapes and communities.

One of Blue Forest’s valued partners is Vibrant Planet. A Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) based in Truckee, California, Vibrant Planet is “dedicated to fostering climate resilient communities and ecosystems.”

Vibrant Planet provides land managers and community resilience leaders with vetted and open science to better understand current conditions, hazard, and risk on their landscapes. Using the provided data, land management plans can be designed and optimized for community safety and other management outcomes in fire-adapted landscapes while improving ecological function.

Early Beginnings

A 2020 spin-off from the original non-profit now known as Vibrant Planet Data Commons, the PBC was co-founded by Allison Wolff, Scott Conway, Guy Bayes, Neil Hunt, and Maria Tran—a team with diverse backgrounds spanning the forestry and technology industries. They set out to  accelerate wildfire and climate resilience, and enhance ecosystem function, by harnessing AI, multiple scientific disciplines, and data visualization to help inform decisions in risk management, land management, land use, and environmental markets.

In Wolff’s words, “we built this really sophisticated platform and the way to think of it is applied A.I. plus applied science for the benefit of the land.”

Last year, Vibrant Planet combined forces with the country’s leading wildfire threat assessment research firm, Pyrologix, expanding the ability to diagnose current conditions and risk on the land to its already robust platform. This platform helps Vibrant Planet support recommendations based on the outcomes a land manager is seeking.

“We can help them [land managers] figure out where to focus their attention and in what order of priority, both in terms of avoided losses to built infrastructure, but also avoided losses to carbon, water, and recreation values together with forecasted enhancements,” explained Wolff. “Because, as we’re reducing risk we’re also enhancing ecosystem services if we’re doing it right, not just doing fuel breaks but really, ecologically rebuilding resilient ecosystems.”

Rooted In Science  

In 2018, Wolff, a Colorado native and environmentalist at heart, was exploring the possibility of a climate center in Truckee, CA when the tragic Camp Fire hit Paradise. Since then, she has tackled her concern about the rapid increase in catastrophic wildfire and its impact on communities and the environment head on. “That (Camp Fire) was my head-first dive into the fire issue,” shared Wolff.

At the time, Blue Forest had just launched its pilot Yuba I FRB on the Tahoe National Forest and was in talks with the Nature Conservancy and other partners on the North Yuba landscape for a second larger project now known as the Yuba II FRB. Wolff and Blue Forest CEO, Zach Knight, connected while working with mutual partners in this landscape. The two put together a work session on conservation finance and started thinking through solutions to questions like “how to get catalytic philanthropic capital to bear on this problem and the multitude of solutions that are needed to actually fix the problem systemically.”

As an example, in the North Yuba landscape, Vibrant Planet and Blue Forest partnered with the Yuba Water Agency (YWA) to model and quantify the potential avoided loss from proposed treatments. Our estimates determined a potential avoided loss of $15,000,000 for YWA, given the risk of wood volume clean up, sedimentation, and potential disruption to power generation in the New Bullards Bar Reservoir.

Since then, the two organizations have provided modeling and quantification support on the Tahoe National Forest and more recently, the Southern California Fireshed WCS Landscape. Vibrant Planet is also working with Blue Forest partners Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative and PG&E.

Looking Ahead

We continue to collaborate on the North Yuba II landscape and seek out new ways to combine forces toward a shared goal.

“I think the combination of us is magic. We’re not just supporting fuel breaks around towns; we’re supporting ecological management in addition to community risk reduction,” said Wolff. “Our ability to quantify the value of nature in planning processes with forecasted values and then monitored values combined with Blue Forest’s ability to use the science and community engagement to unlock finance is this double whammy that is so critical in our space. We’re just thrilled about it and can’t wait to do more together at this intersection where it’s so needed.”